Lift Quit Me

Last nite, I was doing some brush hogging and my lift quit working. I stopped, unhooked the 'hog and when I drove forward, the arms stayed level where I disconnected them. The lift wouldn't go up or down. (You can manually pick up the arms but not push them down, and the lift control handle is worthless.) The lift handle feels like it doesn't have any resistance until about 3/4 of the way to the top of its travel. If you let go of the handle below this point, it falls all the way down. I was about a half mile from home on some lease pasture, so I drove it home with out the brush hog. When I got home, the lift was all the way up and the control handle had been all the way down for the whole trip. After one day, the lift has bled back down to where it was when I unhooked it. I don't use it real hard and mostly just to mow small areas and around fences. Occasionally I box blade with it. Any ideas, anyone thanks in advance.

Nate

You could be lucky, and all that is wrong is that the spool valve is stuck. But the talk of the position control just flopping down to the bottom doesn't sound good.

If you know how the thing works, you can pull off the right hand inspection cover, stick your left hand in the oil and find the spool valve, and move the position control with your right hand. You can tell whether or not the spool valve is moving as the yoke moves back and forth. It is almost certainly not moving. Try "helping" the linkage by pushing or pulling on the spool with your left hand, if you haven't already found broken parts.

If you haven't been in there before, drain the fluid (save it if it isn't too nasty to reuse). Then take off the right hand cover, and repeat the above looking visually with a flashlight. The spool valve must move in and out of the pump body at least an inch as the position control is moved through its full range.

The 8N control valving is different, but can suffer from somewhat similar problems.